


Life in the Web: Come Dance With Me

by prairiecrow



Category: ReBoot (TV)
Genre: Dirty Dancing, Enemies to Lovers, Established Relationship, M/M, Mercenaries, The Web - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 07:16:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17862800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: Their old lives lay in a dead system, ravaged by the TechnoPhage, who had left no survivors save the two strongest inhabitants — who, fighting side-by-side, had managed to win free from the general slaughter. Sometimes, deep in the dark of night, Bob remembered his last conscious moment in Mainframe: yelling that he had to go back for Dot, turning his back on Megabyte to deploy his zip board… then a blackout blow from behind, and he'd come back online many microseconds later, dumped in the co-pilot chair of a hijacked Phage ship with Megabyte at the controls, piloting them into the Web.Mainframe was a wasteland. Everything Bob loved had been wiped out. But he was still compiling — and so was Megabyte. And by working together as mercenaries, they'd managed to stay that way.





	Life in the Web: Come Dance With Me

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place over twelve minutes (months) after Bob and Megabyte's escape from Mainframe.

"She's not coming," Bob muttered into his glass of ROM, just loudly enough to be heard over the background noise of the dimly lit bar across the small table that they shared: sprites shouting their conversations, glasses clinking on trays and tabletops, and throbbing upbeat techno music suitable for energetic dancing.

Megabyte, who was scanning the sexually undulating crowd on the dance floor, raised one scarlet eyebrow and took a refined sip from his flute of neurowine, never deigning to glance at his former Guardian companion. "Patience, Bob," he murmured, and even through the bass pulse of the band his resonant voice carried easily. "Calpurnia keeps her engagements."

Bob eyed him skeptically. Normally the presence of a huge Type III virus in a crowded bar would have sent the patrons screaming towards the exits at top speed, but the Trojan upgrade that Bob had pitched in for was working perfectly: at this moment, Megabyte resembled an older cobalt-skinned sprite with a triple backward sweep of sleek hair, a long square jaw, an eagle's nose, and glowing green eyes that, even hooded, seemed to cut through the dark smoky air with the penetrating intensity of twin laser beams. Undeniably handsome in a cold and arrogant way, he had been drawing admiring glances from quite a number of women and even a few men ever since they'd walked into the bar over a full microsecond ago.

Bob was doing his level best not to feel jealous — after all, as far as he knew Megabyte had never shown the slightest merge-interest in anybody else… but the pseudo-sprite could flirt, oh yes, if it was in the service of manipulating a client or a target.

Or Bob, of course, but Bob was pretty sure that he was largely immune by now to Megabyte's tricks.

 _Pretty_ sure.

Still… even with his Guardian codes intact, he found his gaze drawn from scanning their environment to the disguised virus sitting so close to him, again and again. The false sprite frame mimicked Megabyte's actual physical build — broad shoulders, deep chest, narrow waist, clad in an expensively cut suit of iridescent black trimmed with flashes of luminous purple, and he carried himself (as always) like a prince among commoners. Bob's role when dealing with clients was to play 'good cop', the streetwise former Guardian with a heart of gold. And for the most part, that was still who he was in his core…

… but on a night like this, his deeply embedded inner streak of wickedness was capable of flaring up like a hidden fire that he had never quite been able to put out.

He drained his glass of ROM and slammed it down on the tabletop. "She's not coming, Megabyte," he insisted. "And if she does show up, she can find us on the dance floor." He pushed back his chair, stood up, braced both hands flat on the table, and leaned in close to whisper into the pseudo-sprite's neatly formed left ear: "C'mon, let's show them all a thing or two."

Megabyte's head did not turn, but his gaze slid sidelong to meet Bob's challenging stare and a trace of a smirk curved his thin green lips. Oh, the things those lips could do! "Feeling a little possessive, are we, Bob?"

"Dance with me." Bob knew full well that Megabyte was not one to be commanded (except on a very few, unutterably precious occasions when they were alone in deepest intimacy), but that didn't stop him from trying.

"Hm." Megabyte drained the last two mouthfuls of the neurowine and set down his glass without haste. "Or perhaps a touch exhibitionistic." A pause. Bob's gaze did not waver. At last, a long-suffering sigh. "Very well… but the instant Calpurnia makes her appearance, it will be straight back to business."

"You've got it," Bob agreed.

Megabyte rose, towering over everybody else in the room, and laid one large hand (easily strong enough to tear through the side of a tank) on the small of Bob's back, guiding him toward the dance floor as if the whole thing had been his idea in the first place. The dancers made room for him like smaller fish clearing the way for a shark, and when he turned to face Bob fully and closed both hands on the smaller sprite's waist, falling effortlessly into the beat and pulling Bob close for an elegant but unmistakably passionate bump-and-grind…

… at that instant, grinding back and tilting his head back to look up into those gloating emerald eyes with their cores of red fire, Bob felt like the luckiest sprite in the whole length and breadth of the Web.

**Author's Note:**

> I should be writing at least one piece of fan fiction (in various fandoms) a week for the foreseeable future, as part of a CBT Depression group therapy class assignment. The challenge was to make a contract with myself to do one fun activity (at least) per week, which I had ceased to enjoy because of the depression. I chose fanfic writing.
> 
> The goal is not necessarily to HAVE fun, but to DO something fun, even if it doesn't FEEL fun at the time. With time and effort, hopefully the old sense of enjoyment will return. :)


End file.
